So now, here, in the the tenth episode of the third season, Yellowjackets finally explains why none of this shit ever came up before now: the magic of memory suppression! All of a sudden, we start hearing about how hard it’s been for the adults to remember what happened to them out there — not because it was so bad, according to Shauna, but because it was so good! The experience of hunting and eating people to honor a Wilderness demon made them “so alive in that place that we lost our capacity for self-reflection,” according to Shauna. “We can’t or won’t remember it clearly because we recognize, deep down, that we were having so much fun.” That’s why Shauna acted like a nincompoop instead of a sociopath all this time, you see. “I let it all slip away from me,” she writes. “It’s time to start taking it back.”
Long past time, if you ask me! It’s now apparent that Yellowjackets‘ own structure prevents it from working. It creates a scenario in which the filmmakers cannot be honest with or about the adult characters, because doing so would spoil the teenage material. This creates an obvious qualitative discrepancy between the two storylines. If this had been a show just about the kids, that would be something. If the adult material had been presented seriously, without holding back just what they did out there and why, and with the adult characters’ personalities existing in continuity with what happened back then, that would be something. What we got is neither.
I reviewed the season finale of Yellowjackets for Pop Heist.
Tags: horror, pop heist, TV, TV reviews, yellowjackets